The recent Auckland Holocaust Memorial Trust/Curia Market Research poll on popular awareness of the Holocaust in New Zealand is as depressing as it is unsurprising. Only 43 per cent of respondents felt confident about their knowledge and about 4 per cent thought the Holocaust was a myth or exaggerated. Perhaps most worryingly, roughly a third of respondents were unsure or refused to respond on whether the Holocaust was a myth.
As Holocaust Centre of New Zealand chief executive Chris Harris told Newsroom, New Zealand's education system is not conveying key historical facts, and in this we are not that different from the rest of the world. Recent polls – including the much-discussed CNN poll of European perceptions of the Holocaust – have shown that knowledge of the Holocaust is woefully inadequate even in regions much more intimately connected than Aotearoa with the attempted genocide of the Jews.
We are right to feel outraged at the idea that a majority of New Zealanders don't know how many millions of Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, but outrage alone will not suffice.
This poll should encourage us to take on a more demanding conversation, which is partly about Holocaust remembrance and partly about how we relate to and teach the past in this country.
There is something of a backlash against the way the Holocaust has been memorialised and elevated to universal symbol of evil, with some misunderstanding this for a pitch for supremacy over other historical events. Why – I have been asked more than once – is it relevant to New Zealand? To those who were pursued across Europe and beyond with dedicated extermination techniques, legislation, actions and zeal, the Holocaust will always mean something different, but it also pertains deeply and painfully to the history of humanity.
Since 1945, the Nazi death camps have forced us – globally – to rethink what makes us human and how easily that can be damaged; they have caused us to question the trajectory of human progress and to realise the dangers of nationalism, technology, bureaucracy and the mechanisation of decision-making; they have led us to ponder the limits of representation, what can be said and what should perhaps be tapu; they have solicited the enshrining of universal human rights into legislation. Most of all, Auschwitz, Sobibor, Treblinka, Belzec, Chelmno, the ravine at Babi Yar, the forest of Ponari and countless other sites of genocide have confronted us all and forever with evidence that even small, gradual acts of hate, intolerance and discrimination can have unspeakable consequences, as does looking the other way.
If we care for a fair, mature, self-aware society that truly makes hate alien, we cannot ignore the history of the Holocaust. We will find there echoes and harbingers of imperial violence and colonisation, of dawn raids and segregation, of xenophobia, of indifference and conformism, and of all manner of forms of resistance. The Holocaust is New Zealand history through these connections, but also in more explicit terms through the stories of those who found refuge here and of those New Zealanders who fought to defeat the Nazis, as well as through the country's reaction to the unfolding events.
And that leads us to second problem, which is in my view more pressing: there are fundamental truths to be found in the many histories of the Holocaust, yet that knowledge alone is not enough to produce the antibodies we need to fight intolerance. What would a similar poll find if it surveyed New Zealanders' knowledge of the New Zealand Wars, I wonder?
History is not an elective subject. It is the stuff on which we fashion our understanding of ourselves and of others; it is the recognition of diverse perspectives upon which we build cohesion; it is the place where we elaborate our collective traumas to find at least some solace. History is the conversation that gives us the ability to recognise the signs the next time around, and hopefully the collective resilience to stand up.
New Zealand is part of a global trend that fails to recognise the significance of the past, assuming that the digital age has made facts freely and easily available and the teaching of history somewhat obsolete. History teaching has focused more and more on skills, and less and less on content: have we gone too far? Are there not histories we should all know? Have we reduced history to commemoration, succumbing to the facile narrative that history is boring or "written by the victors" and other such clichés?
The results of this poll will rightly hurt and worry the Jewish community and those concerned with rising and evolving anti-Semitism, but their relevance has a wider reach. Unfortunately, New Zealand knows all too well it is not immune to hate and racist violence; it is time we had a national conversation about how knowledge of the past matters to all.
* Giacomo Lichtner is an Associate Professor of History at Victoria University of Wellington.